Mission Wolf: Experiment in Living

‘I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear’ – this Walt Whitman verse from one of his famous poems ‘I hear America singing’ could easily be the motto of this incredible and heartwarming featurette that is, without doubt, an emotional rollercoaster for the viewer. As it starts, you may not be hooked up on watching it, or you may feel like it is not worth the time, but you will notice that with every passing minute, there is no turning back.

The narrative follows the stories of different people who come from very different backgrounds, all coping with their past by being strongly grounded in their future. In the wild lands of Colorado, they made a refuge where rescued wolves would get a chance to grow and live in a proper way. Gayle Nosal and Beret E. Strong’s documentary can be seen as a poem of life and resurrection, the poem of nature as the mother that takes care of all of her children, the poem of mankind loving and helping one another in times of misery.

Drifting away from the storyline and going deep into the specs of this film, we would like to focus our attention on the camera work. Thanks to the incredible work of the camera operator, we are lucky to see some extraordinary sights that we would never dream of seeing or, to be honest, that we never imagined existed on this planet in the first place. What makes this featurette stand out are the mind-blowing shots of nature, sometimes crude, other times delicate, that are all creating a real perspective of the matter without an unnecessary makeover. The raw nature of the interview parts is an indicator of pure passion that transcends the need for standout-prefabricated stories. There is not one thing that feels superficial in this documentary, and this is all that matters the most. We do not care that sometimes the camera work is a little bit shaky as the story calls for it as long as we get to receive the perfect untainted message from the person delivering the story.

There are too many positive adjectives to describe ‘Mission Wolf: Experiment in Living’, but we will not go any deeper in finding the perfect ones. What we will do is recommend this documentary to anyone interested in flawlessly told stories with a natural vibe that are as unique to cinematography as the aforementioned poem of Whitman to the literary scene.